Supervision of ethylene propylene diene M-class (EPDM) rubber vulcanization and recovery processes using attenuated total reflection Fourier transform infrared (ATR FT-IR) spectroscopy and multivariate analysis

EPDM rubber is widely used in a diverse type of applications, such as the automotive, industrial and construction sectors among others. Due to its appealing features, the consumption of vulcanized EPDM rubber is growing significantly. However, environmental issues are forcing the application of devu...

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Detalles Bibliográficos
Autores: Riba Ruiz, Jordi-Roger|||0000-0001-8774-2389, Canals Parelló, Trini, Cantero Gómez, María Rosa
Tipo de recurso: artículo
Fecha de publicación:2016
País:España
Institución:Universitat Politècnica de Catalunya (UPC)
Repositorio:UPCommons. Portal del coneixement obert de la UPC
Idioma:inglés
OAI Identifier:oai:upcommons.upc.edu:2117/98460
Acceso en línea:https://hdl.handle.net/2117/98460
https://dx.doi.org/10.1177/0003702816653131
Access Level:acceso abierto
Palabra clave:Vulcanization
Rubber
Fourier transform infrared spectroscopy
Tires--Recycling
Infrared spectroscopy.
Microwaves
Multivariate analysis
Anàlisi espectral
Cautxú
Vulcanització
Pneumàtics -- Reciclatge
Anàlisi multivariable
Microones
Transformades de Fourier
Àrees temàtiques de la UPC::Enginyeria dels materials::Materials plàstics i polímers
Descripción
Sumario:EPDM rubber is widely used in a diverse type of applications, such as the automotive, industrial and construction sectors among others. Due to its appealing features, the consumption of vulcanized EPDM rubber is growing significantly. However, environmental issues are forcing the application of devulcanization processes to facilitate the recovery, which has led rubber manufacturers to implement strict quality controls. Consequently, it is important to develop methods for supervising the vulcanizing and recovering processes of such products. This paper deals with the supervision process of EPDM compounds by means of Fourier transform mid-infrared (FTIR) spectroscopy and suitable multivariate statistical methods. A nondestructive and expeditive classification approach was applied to a sufficient number of EPDM samples with different applied processes, that is, with and without application of vulcanizing agents, vulcanized samples and microwave treated samples. First the FTIR spectra of the samples is acquired and next it is processed by applying suitable feature extraction methods, i.e., principal component analysis (PCA) and canonical variate analysis (CVA) to obtain the latent variables to be used for classifying test EPDM samples. Finally, the k-NN (k nearest neighbor) algorithm was used in the classification stage. Experimental results prove the accuracy of the proposed method and the potential of FTIR spectroscopy in this area, since the classification accuracy can be as high as 100%.